Dedicated Hosting

Dedicated Hosting

A dedicated hosting is the only type where your website gets an entire server to itself. The server is dedicated to your site alone, so that all of its resources are at your site’s disposal. By contrast, with a shared hosting plan, resources are shared with many other sites.

A dedicated hosting offers more reliability and many more resources compared to shared hosting. That inevitably means that it costs you more, so it’s up to you to decide whether the benefits are worth the additional expense. If you’re not quite committed to the idea, then a cheaper solution for now might be VPS dedicated hosting, which offers the best of both worlds.

Dedicated hosting is best suited to big websites that routinely handle a lot of traffic, and so need top performance, excellent security and rock-solid stability. With only your site on the server, that’s a bonus for security straight away, but you also get a choice of security software on top, for even more peace of mind.

A dedicated hosting naturally gives you a great deal of flexibility and full control of your server. You can configure everything as you want it, run your preferred operating system, hardware, apps and scripts, and because you’re not sharing it, performance is always great. All in all, a dedicated hosting service gives you incredible control over your website.

Managing a Dedicated Server

Although total control of the server is one of the main reasons why customers opt for a dedicated hosting, that doesn’t mean to say you have to do everything by yourself. You can opt for server management and support too, so that all of the many necessary administration tasks are taken care of for you.

Most hosting providers offering dedicated servers let you choose the operating system and applications they want. In this way the server can be modified to meet your requirements exactly. Not all providers are the same so it’s important to make sure that they do indeed offer the level of customization that you require.

It should be fairly obvious from this that dedicated hosting services are best suited to users with technical experience. Dedicated hosting often include user-friendly control panels that let you automate the creation of websites, databases, the management of hosting or email accounts and some of the server’s functions too. These web-based control panels are useful, but they don’t give you full access to the server.

Dedicated servers are expensive and hard to manage, but you can get the best of both worlds by ordering your own VPS dedicated server. This will give you almost the same level of functionality and independence, along with customizable OS and settings. You’ll also get upgradable cloud resources.

Types of Dedicated Hosting Services

According to the level of server management, hosting companies offer two main types of dedicated server hosting, managed and unmanaged.

With some providers, managed hosting could include full management of the server, and with others, just partial management. Some hosting providers don’t offer any management services at all. Managed, dedicated hosting is recommended for inexperienced users, while unmanaged hosting will only suit people who are specialized in system administration and website development.